Why the Nashville Predators Win the 2017 Stanley Cup

Commonly referred to as the most difficult trophy in sports to capture, the Stanley Cup is once again up for grabs with the matchup set for the final and that introductory cliché is the main argument for this article’s thesis: the Nashville Predators are going to win the Stanley Cup.

The Penguins, the team they’ll face in the final, will be attempting to lift Lord Stanley’s mug for the second straight year, a near impossible feat in today’s NHL. No team has successfully defended a Stanley Cup win since the Red Wings did in 1998 and this Penguins team is just the fourth to make it back to the final a year after winning.

It’s very impressive that the Pens have made it this far but they barely scraped by in an Eastern Conference final most thought they would breeze through and it looks like they could be running out of gas.

Banged up and tired, the Pens will meet a Nashville team that’s been absolutely rolling its way through the postseason and that’s needed just 16 games to make it this far. Come time for Game 1, the Preds will have had a full week of recovery and are expected to get a fully healthy Mike Fisher back in the lineup. I not only think the Preds win this series, I think they could do it fairly easily.

Here are some reasons why they do:

They Don’t Get Scored on

Allowing just 1.81 goals per game, the Preds have been by far the best defensive club in the postseason and with a plus-1.13 goal differential per game, they haven’t been sacrificing much offense in the process. Although it’s been a team effort, Pekka Rinne is the man worthy of the most praise for the Preds’ sparkling numbers.

The Finnish netminder has been enjoying a run since the middle of March that’s seen him post a 17-8 straight-up record with a .942 save percentage – arguably the best stretch of his career – and until Rinne gets blown up, there’s no reason to believe he won’t keep it up.

A blue line that’s made up of Roman Josi, P.K. Subban, Ryan Ellis and Mattias Ekholm deserves a lot of the credit as well. They’ve been dominating every group of forwards they’ve had the pleasure of defending and represent by far the best core of d-men the Penguins will have played this postseason.

The Pens had a ton of trouble scoring on the Senators (outside of their seven-goal outburst in Game 5) and they’ll be in for a serious culture shock if they come into this best-of-seven thinking goals will be easy to come by.

They’re Nearly Unbeatable at Home

Going 7-1 at Bridgestone Arena this postseason and 31-18 straight up since the start of the 2016-17 campaign, the fans in Nashville have gotten behind their team and every playoff game in Smashville has been a party. It’s felt for a while that this team was destined to make it to the brink and now that they have, it feels wrong cheering against them.

Additionally, Nashville has a 52.63 Corsi-for percentage on home ice this postseason and the Penguins have an overall Corsi-for percentage of just 41. What this means is that it’s extremely likely that the Preds dominate possession and shot metrics at home and I find it hard to picture them losing a game on friendly ice.

Pittsburgh has been getting incredibly lucky all postseason with timely goals and outrageous goaltending performances from Marc-Andre Fleury and Matt Murray. Math has to catch up to them at some point and if I’m right, it will happen against a Preds side that gets the check mark from me at every position other than center.

That said, Sidney Crosby has been terrible in his three Stanley Cup final appearances, amassing just one goal in his last 16 games when participating in the last series of the year. If Sid the Kid goes silent in yet another final, the Pens will be handing the trophy over to their mustard yellow colored rivals at the conclusion of the NHL’s centennial season.

Final Prediction

Nashville's depth and defensive dominance will prove to be too much for a diminished team that's ready for a vacation. I think the Predators put some twang on this series and win it in six games, putting all the takes about "experience" where they belong, in the trash.

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